Thoughts & feedback so far

[Vesparco]

Hi there,

After some playthrought (20h+) I thought it was the proper time to start giving feedback. Also, I was interested into knowing other player's experience in the current state of the game.

The reason for this also is that I have the feeling I am on the road to losing the game and I would like to know the experience of the veterans to assess the situation.

How it begins:
- Black beard difficulty. Central base in the black sea in Europe (I feel is the most centralised point to have reach with the Airbus). With the first rewards I raise numbers of brainers up to 5 in order to speed up things. New missions are fun to play.
Very pleasant surprises:
- You don't have an aquarium. Your live fish have died (aquatic missions are quite fun).
- Temple raid full of zombies ( luckily the map was open and I brought a machine gun on the ship).
How it evolved:
- Expansion bases in America and south America. Starting with barracks and extractor to push the economy. Later an outpost. Later a large barracks and workshop on America.
- The main base gets bigger. Workshop,Large barracks, Large vaults and a new hangar for the Aircar.
- The number of brainers is raised to 8 and then to 10 to achieve a balanced economy (not a blooming one).
Where I am now:
- 5-6 Months in the game.
- Boarding guns and Linux SMG is the bare bone of the firepower.
- Changed the turtle for the airbus. airbus sent to america but not in use.
- Metal armor is about to finish, interceptor assembly is arriving and also the still (miracles of basic engineering&tinkering).
- I have found an academy base in steel pact.

The feeling:
- The shipping's have raised considerably in size and firepower, the speeds at which they move are far superior to my vessels. I assume it is my fault of not pursuing a better coverage of the map (specially since I delayed the overcharged radar) as I feel that the optic was to engage on land.
- The base raid is unfeasible. 9 gals vs a base with gauss tech and psionics is quite impossible. I thought of using camo armor to increase the reactions in order to "kill before getting killed" but my gals are quite unexperienced for the task.
- I am confused on behalf economy vs research. My approach was maybe too research-focused, but I feel somewhat low in the tech department. Also the economy is difficult to push due to the lack of technology to support it (Destilling helerium with 20/50 runts), which makes me think that I should have expanded to world covegare before getting more than 5 brainers.
- Airspeeder is a must to the main base as it shut downs the preys for the airbus (and also because you can put into motion the seagulls quickly). In remote bases aircar is better to scavenge as many civilian crafts as possible.
- I experienced a lot of stationary missions (which are great) but I haven't been able to intercept many faction ships. Some guild runabouts and raiders only.

Bugs:
I believe the assault of the tower has a tile bug in which the door is blocked by a robot. If you bring something to take it down you can enter, otherwise you can't.

Things I would add (if feasible):
- directional illumination (same as vision or narrower).  This would enable the use of torchlights, dedicated outfits  and maybe weapon add-ons using the blessings of the duct tape. Running around with the mag-lite is cool but somehow silly after some months.
- Illumination in enemy bases. For aliens was understandable but for human faction is somehow weird. In combination with the gauss weaponry makes me think you have to exploit an alternative way of armors (night ops, smokey, camo...). Not sure if it is the objective.
Things I would like to see:
- Raider thugs as "fast, cheap HWP". Just to fill the gaps of the airbus/turtle when sickbay is throwing a party with 3/4 of the gang there. Parrots don't do the trick.

[legionof1]

The tower assault robot is not a bug. It is intended for the door to be blocked. It's even mentioned in the briefing screen that you need to bypass the robot, you even get a hint that it explodes. Going through the tower wall with a hammer is what i normally do.

Expanded coverage does help but getting into air combat is pretty hard. And somewhat unnecessary for a fairly long time. Landed craft and the missions like temple raids and such are more then sufficient to occupy the gals and the brainers for long periods. I would even venture to say you could manage to complete the campaign without building anything but your menace craft and the Conqueror. Beyond that just having the capacity to efficiently handle anything more then a gunboat is either an exceptionally expensive multi craft setup or end game tech. Alot of this stems from the new ufo armor sharply limiting light slots ability to finish what missiles start. Heavy slots are next to useless for a very long period of the game because you dont have anything besides 105 rockets and the naval gun, until you have nuke lasers or plasma tech. This leaves missiles to do the lifting which means lots of slots.

You do need some sort of massive jackpot(mansion, gold transport) to really get off the ground economy wise. The early loot is just not sufficient to give the player the opportunity to easily expand given the premium on establishing new bases. And the problem is that 3-4 bases are needed to have room for all the things that need to happen in a game, plus tracking bases. New craft are also expensive in time and cash, and the more craft you add the more pilots you need, which means less barracks space for industry.

All told the present version is much more fun and smoother to play but it takes years more of game time to get to the same point. My first win took me about 3 game years and like 400 hours. Now im 5 years and 700 hours in on a different playthrough and only now getting into late game.

[CaptainCorkscrew]

- I am confused on behalf economy vs research. My approach was maybe too research-focused, but I feel somewhat low in the tech department. Also the economy is difficult to push due to the lack of technology to support it (Destilling helerium with 20/50 runts), which makes me think that I should have expanded to world covegare before getting more than 5 brainers.
- Airspeeder is a must to the main base as it shut downs the preys for the airbus (and also because you can put into motion the seagulls quickly). In remote bases aircar is better to scavenge as many civilian crafts as possible.

The X-Grog is available from one of the four starting research items and already a better option than Hellerium. Once you have apples you can easily make even more profit.
Missiles are far too expensive to use IMHO, so the airspeeder is a bad option. There is some other fast vessel available early on that can use a single light weapon, which is sufficient for civilian craft.
Both these things help your economy.

[KateMicucci]

There is a very early game tech which gives you a much more profitable export than hellerium.

Attack dogs already exist for your imagined fast, cheap HWP role. They're good melee fighters and utterly expendable. Problem is that the auxiliary capacity of your transport is limited.

Maglights are no longer necessary once you get good ranged flame weapons and nightvision equipment. Directional lighting would be nice, but we should appreciate that the lighting in the game has come a very long way in the last few versions.

Base raid with 9 gals is only unfeasible if you're trying to pull it off with crap like Linux SMGs. You're still at the point where gals armed with mostly melee weapons will outperform gals all armed with guns, especially against armored enemies. With a team of gals with melee weapons, and a few powerful looted ranged weapons and armors if you're lucky enough to find them, an early game base raid is possible.

[Vesparco]

The X-Grog is available from one of the four starting research items and already a better option than Hellerium. Once you have apples you can easily make even more profit.
Missiles are far too expensive to use IMHO, so the airspeeder is a bad option. There is some other fast vessel available early on that can use a single light weapon, which is sufficient for civilian craft.
Both these things help your economy.

Yes, I know this stuff. The only inconvenient is that is centralised on the main base as it is the only one with a Still on it (and I've seen that the tech comes quite later). This gets a little more complicated if you want to host the lab and the muscle within the same base.

The only way I think I could overpass this is to quickly de-centralize the "strike team" from the main base in order to start spamming extractors in order to have a sizeable workforce of brewers. A satellite base with vaults and containment could serve as buffer for the main base.

There is a very early game tech which gives you a much more profitable export than hellerium.

Attack dogs already exist for your imagined fast, cheap HWP role. They're good melee fighters and utterly expendable. Problem is that the auxiliary capacity of your transport is limited.

Maglights are no longer necessary once you get good ranged flame weapons and nightvision equipment. Directional lighting would be nice, but we should appreciate that the lighting in the game has come a very long way in the last few versions.

Base raid with 9 gals is only unfeasible if you're trying to pull it off with crap like Linux SMGs. You're still at the point where gals armed with mostly melee weapons will outperform gals all armed with guns, especially against armored enemies. With a team of gals with melee weapons, and a few powerful looted ranged weapons and armors if you're lucky enough to find them, an early game base raid is possible.

I take note of the flamethrower. I have already researched one but I don't know if I can buy ammunition. I have to check also if burning arrows do the trick.

Concerning the melee. While effective is kind of tricky. Untrained gals suffer the most at low TU and Stamina. Reaction gauss fire is also a common way of early retirement. Then psionic attacks usually position your troops in bad places. Maybe with smoke it could be feasible but I believe I don't have the tech yet. Nothing is imposible, but you need the luck on your side XD.

Concerning the tech tree, I am really happy with the evolution. As you said the pace is quite smoother and fun to play. One thought that I have is that I've been going sideways in the tech tree instead of going up (researching weapons, interrogations and such before going into the key technologies ). It may be more effective to reach the "reasonable" top before branching sideways (wich I believe is before researching "*Mutan alliance*", considering you want to have optional the mutant progroms).

[Starving Poet]

Early on, economy is probably your most important resource - you can buy some really great weapons from the blackmarket - you just need to cash on hand.  On my current play-through I had a devastating financial hit early on - but I've managed to pull through and get ahead of the curve because I've been focusing on mt manufacturing capacity pretty much straight up.

[tylor]

Afaik first order of things is to be able to afford 15 brainer.
And Shnapps de Mort (or whatever it is called) helps a lot with this.

[Solarius Scorch]

Afaik first order of things is to be able to afford 15 brainer.

While this is what experienced players do, I believe this advice is a bit misleading. The truth is, there is little pressure in the game; you can in fact finish it with just 1 Brainer, only it'll take you dozens of in-game years.

There are basically two things that are absolutely necessary:
1) Don't go bankrupt.
2) Don't allow your points go negative too often.

These are hard lose conditions; fail here and you're done.

Naturally, to succeed you should also pay attention to other goals, like: having gals experienced enough to do more difficult missions (which will give you more points and money), doing research reasonably fast (because it gives points, helps make money and and gives you better combat gear). These are "soft" conditions though, meaning you don't lose the game if you fail to meet them, only meeting hard limitations will become harder.

Piratez is actually a very hard game to lose. The only way to actually lose it, barring failing the two "hard" conditions, is to lose your last base to a Crackdown. But if you don't shoot down ships, you won't get any Crackdowns unless much later in the game.

[karadoc]

I wouldn't advise spamming extractors.

While extractors are one of the very early-game ways to scale up your economy, they certainly are not a fast or efficient way to do it. There are better options available long before the extractor + runts + barracks can even get close to earning back their initial costs.

X-grog is a decent money maker. So it is probably worth getting a few workshops running alongside the still. A second still in another base is often a worthwhile investment as well. The still is only an early game money maker. More lucrative manufacturing options will come up later on; but it is a decent stop-gap option. (And although x-grog is only really good for the early game, Chateau de le mort is always pretty good - so it's useful to have a still for that.)

Regarding having the still in the main base, I think you'll find that it's useful to have the still + workshops there, regardless of what the base's focus is. It's useful to have a lot of workshop space in your main assault base, because you need to be able to process the enslaving and extraction spoils of your raids; and its useful to be able to manufacture the weapons and armour you need directly in the base, rather than shipping materials and products backwards and forwards.

And if the original base is just a research base, you need the still anyway, because it's a prerequisite building for study rooms.

--

For the early game, it's tempting to think that investing in manufacturing is the best option for expanding your economy; but I believe that's actually a bit of a trap. I think you'll find that you get a far far faster pay-off from instead increasing your ability to do more ground missions. That means hiring more hands, getting longer range craft and craft weapons, and getting a radar in a second base. If you can shoot down civilian shipping, then that will pay for itself much faster than x-grog manufacturing.

[Absalom]

I wouldn't advise spamming extractors.

For the early game, it's tempting to think that investing in manufacturing is the best option for expanding your economy; but I believe that's actually a bit of a trap. I think you'll find that you get a far far faster pay-off from instead increasing your ability to do more ground missions. That means hiring more hands, getting longer range craft and craft weapons, and getting a radar in a second base. If you can shoot down civilian shipping, then that will pay for itself much faster than x-grog manufacturing.

So you say but craft interception is a very long research path.  You can build extractors and have them crank out flaming arrows (The best non-still item in the early game) in a month.  May be slow to pay off, but the effect of having 6 extra bases with vaults + barracks cannot be underestimated. 

There is a very early game tech which gives you a much more profitable export than hellerium.

Attack dogs already exist for your imagined fast, cheap HWP role. They're good melee fighters and utterly expendable. Problem is that the auxiliary capacity of your transport is limited.

Maglights are no longer necessary once you get good ranged flame weapons and nightvision equipment. Directional lighting would be nice, but we should appreciate that the lighting in the game has come a very long way in the last few versions.

Base raid with 9 gals is only unfeasible if you're trying to pull it off with crap like Linux SMGs. You're still at the point where gals armed with mostly melee weapons will outperform gals all armed with guns, especially against armored enemies. With a team of gals with melee weapons, and a few powerful looted ranged weapons and armors if you're lucky enough to find them, an early game base raid is possible.

Don't attack dogs require the Mutant Alliance, which means pogroms are mandatory? 

[Vesparco]

So you say but craft interception is a very long research path.  You can build extractors and have them crank out flaming arrows (The best non-still item in the early game) in a month.  May be slow to pay off, but the effect of having 6 extra bases with vaults + barracks cannot be underestimated. 

Flame arrows sounds quite cheeky :3. I'll have to check.

Checking the craft in the bootypedia (if the info is not outdated), I believe the best course of action is to reach the pachyderm. It is the fastest accessible vehicle, if choosing the proper research, that is a well round-up. Also it seems to enable the use of most of the armament gained with the drill (in my case, the flamethrower). That should level up fairly the air combat until you can push a proper industry for craft and missiles.

One surprise is that the spy zeppelin can carry 20 people. Seems the way to go for my base assault.

I wouldn't advise spamming extractors.

While extractors are one of the very early-game ways to scale up your economy, they certainly are not a fast or efficient way to do it. There are better options available long before the extractor + runts + barracks can even get close to earning back their initial costs.

I would like to disagree on that (at least until I can proper make the calculations). My idea is to spam extractors within the initial base. The extractor costs 350k, is already available and enables 20 runts. The workshop costs 800k and gives room to 30 and needs research. Then I should check also the refunds & maintenance for each one in order to evaluate the return of costs and profitability.

This approach enables 3 things:
- Push the production of X-Grog early on.
- Accelerate notably the production of Chateau de la Morte. While it doesn't give more money, you are able to expend it earlier (let's say in bases, which require time).
- A sizeable workforce for initial equipements (this one is a little bit flimsy but I would say cave hunting for scale armors as one example)

[Eddie]

On economy:
If it's worth it to expand your workforce to make money depends on what you produce. I ran the numbers and found for grog, it's not worth it. You need to make and sell grog for nearly two month just to get your invested money back. And just after two month, you start making a profit. If you can make wine and have enough apples, then it's worth it to expand.

Worth or not worth depends on what else I can do with that money. More radar coverage gets you more shippings which is more money. Extractor, living quarters and 20 runts costs me about the same as hangar and pigeon or new base and radar. The radar is no foolproof investment though. You need to put it in a busy area and you need to be able to turn spotted shippings into money. You need an economic way to shoot down civilian shippings (aircar and 25mm cannon). If you have more skill, you get more money out of it (live captures etc.).

If you play it right, more radar coverage is a better investment to make money than runts.

Another thing: don't build large vaults in your main base. If storage is a problem, get slaves or put stuff in other bases.

[just_dont]

On economy:

With latest versions, I'm thinking that the game is very close to a sweet spot. Early economy is mostly loot- and ransom/slavery-based. I've crunched numbers for possible manufacturing options - and indeed, as other people already said, they aren't really practical. You'll be looking at ~1 month building time, ~2 months for 100% RoI on a new base not including monthly expenses, and over 3 months with monthly expenses. And that's the even with the best early option (X-Grog). And of course this means that you're basically delaying your main base progress all the time.

I find it much more important to focus on tactical combat results and training gals so that you'll have your strong "core team". This allows you to cut your expenditure (less dead gals -> less expenses on recuits), have WAY more captures (100% capture rate on missions like Temple Raids is quite dangerous with newbies but extremely easy with experienced warriors), and tackle harder missions which give more loot. Researching all coin-related items allows you to start stockpiling some good coins so that later you can use those with Mint for great profits. Researching captures allows you to enslave those who are applicable, and slaves are required for some pretty good economy-boosting options that will come slightly later.

Expanding for radar coverage is decently viable as well, but doing it too early is ill-advised - it's quite pointless to expand unless you can capitalize on it reliably, and that requires an attack craft good enough for civilian traffic (Aircar is good, but Shark Jetbike is better, as it can easily get 100% interception rate on any civ traffic for very low Hellerium cost), a craft gun & ammo, and an experienced pilot to tackle those missions solo (sending your main team on very small civ crashes is an extreme overkill).
Not to mention that you don't really need to expand for radar coverage for purposes of winning or not losing the game. You'll definitely need more bases after a while due to base grid size limits, but there's not many reasons to speed up expansion just for the sake of it.

[Absalom]

All of those approaches rely on getting a useable craft weapon with your ground assaults/ or interceptions with codex weapon of choice.  If you get a bunch of parts, or ammo for different guns, you are SOL.  The ROI on flame arrows may be bad, but you're trading an initial investment for a constant trickle of cash and easy expansion into workshops/stills etc.

[Dioxine]

You're actually losing money producing and selling Flame Arrows.